The silver stick gleamed between his fingers as his wire-rimmed glasses gleamed in the half light on his face. “This one's the charm—this one's where the money is.”
Franchot lit a smoke, illuming his puffy, jowly, pockmarked face with its large, incongruously pretty agate eyes and pancake nose. “You think so, huh? But you been in a news blackout right, because you don't look like you know.” There were ghosts of reverent innocence in his face, which was that of a ruined cherub. There were burns and cracks, folds and fissures in the skin, all made there before the final light went out.
The muscle of the Ork shambled and settled in each corner of the large basement storeroom of Armenian Specialties on South Street, a favorite haven for Malek's meets. They sat down heavily, all four of them, and waited. One goon sucking on the blade of a stiletto with a soulful expression only days before had crushed the metacarpals and metatarsals of Malek the Mallet's under-assistant accountant with his bare hands. He had a soulful look to him then, too.
Franchot knocked the stick of gum out of the rangy, cowlicked, bespectacled man's hand.
“What's the big idea?” he gulped, justifiably afraid to deal head-on with the muscle of the Ork. His eyes were as weak and fearful as a lab rat's.
“The big idea, champ, is that your shit's worse than useless.”
“It's gold, you freak. You heard what Malek said. We have a deal on a hundred thousand units to ship.”
“We ain't shipping nothing to nowhere.”
The stiletto sucker croaked a laugh.
“Suit yourself. I've got my money. If we have no more business together, then we have no more business. I'm cool with that.”
“But the Padrone, ain't.”
Nerves poorly concealed; a quavering. “Well, so what does he want?” The man was already suppressing the shakes, pinpricks of sweat gathering on his smooth, wide brow. He was sizing up the place for an escape. It looked thin and unlikely: a dingy too-small window raised up at sidewalk level, and the one doorway leading to a dark, cramped, dust-moldering stairwell up to the shop's storefront at street-level. There was no way he could fight through the muscle toward any possible egress. He reasoned quickly and rightly that they would have to carry him out, and that, for whatever reason, they no doubt likely would.
I'm well and truly fucked, he thought, his hands going clammy.
“He wants you and a big explanation as to why six kiddies pegged out during a riot at Sang Freud in Cambridge Frid'y night. That's what he wants. And no more distribution.”
“I just make the stuff,” he lied weakly.
“Well, sonny boy, I don't think we made any deliveries to that club.”
Feigning relief and feeling none: “Oh, that! That was just a test market, that's all.”
“Yeah, fucko? Lemme tell ya, your test failed.”
“Not at all. I think it was a huge success.”
Franchot blew out rum blossomed, depraved choirboy cheeks and slammed a fresh copy of the Herald down on Malek's desk so the 80-point headline was plain above the fold: “Freaky Friday Night Massacre.” The subhead told the story in a quarter of the point size: “Six youths killed in kinky club riot.”
“Excellent,” he said, trembling. “Really, it's an indication of addictive need and titration.”
“You think this is good?”
The goon with the stiletto laughed at that.
“I do. It means once it cycles through the nervous system and metabolizes, their brains can't do without the special electric charge of the effect—the neurons have to go rapid fire to reproduce a similar state, or they have to get another dose. Either way, it's a win/win.”
“I don't get it, but you can tell Malek all about it down at the garage.”
Garage. Hot flash: that meant interrogation and discipline or, in a word, torture. “It simply means they have to bang their heads against the wall so that it will feel good to stop. Roughly, if they get violent enough and express it with correct intensity, the cessation of adrenaline and serotonin fluctuation will essentially mimic the benefit of the drug. Don't you see the possibilities?”
“I see it's possible they may hang us all, and the Padrone sees it the same way. So let's get going, shall we, Mr. Fucking Wizard?”
A thin voice from the dark stairwell said, “Why don't you guys stay put for a while?”
Four guns were pulled from the four corners of the room.
Franchot threw the stunned nerd against the wall beneath the grimy window. “Get the fuck down on the floor, Hortense! We got us a rogue.”
He obeyed and cowered on the ground.
“So, sweetheart, you come back to bring us our meth, or did you just come here to suck us all off?”
Null, at the doorway, grim, haggard.
“The meth isn't on the table, but we can discuss your accountant. I didn't do him.”
“You're lying.”
“I have no need to lie. It's just a fact. Contrary to appearances, I don't care about Malek. Or anything, really.”
“Ya—sure. We'll get some due diligence on it and let ya know, Pally, alright?”
“I don't do humor. Gave it up with cigarettes, gambling and heroin.”
“You do death though, don't ya, fuckstick?”
“Yeah. I do that.”
Franchot cackled. “This I wanna see.” He nodded to the muscle. They had slowly risen, weapons slyly positioned, eager to outgun this feeble-looking wizened putz.
“Okay,” said Null, calmly exploding a copper stopper round right in Franchot's throat. Just under the response spray, he dropped and rolled hard into the room, knocking one of the Ork down to the floor, straightening up fast then kneeing him into unconsciousness by jolting his brain up from under the chin.
He was rewarded by a bullet nick to the shoulder whose deliverer he instantly and thoughtlessly shot through the heart with a nine-millimeter exploding round that made a large, sloppy crater out of what once was his back. The huge goon's cohort grabbed the stiletto out of his hand and stuck Null hard in the chest with it. Null, not even breathing hard, yanked it out and calmly slashed him into pieces right through his Versace leather jacket. The huge goon bore down on him while he was slashing, gave him punishing smashes to the head and ribs no such small man could weather. But he seemed to ignore them.
Null was unaffected, save but to bust out hard and fast with his arm to deliver a hammer smash directly to the eyes, which sent the huge goon flailing backward into the wall and flat on his ass, there absolutely being nothing and no one in the way to impede his falling.
That meant that Mr. Wizard, the nerd, had slipped out the door when the fun began.
The huge goon was not to be daunted. As Null finished cooling his cohort by making him eat the long blade of the knife, the goon put him in a choke hold with twenty-two inches of well worked biceps squeezing down hard on carotid and trachea. He had moved quickly and the hold was solid, the leverage right.
Null calculated the odds, still killing the cohort, knew that this was it, but kept feeding the cohort the knife blade down his throat nevertheless, just as if he were still winning. And to his mind, he was.
The goon kept squeezing, no let-up.
Null's vision went red, then black, then he dropped the knife and the world itself as well.
That was it for him—
Or should have been.
The goon let go.
Null lay in a heap on the floor amongst the corpses, panting. As his vision came back, he realized that he was watching the goon being ridden by a boy with a slight frame, like a moose with a jockey on its back. The goon was hysterical, crashing himself from wall to wall, caroming about desperately to get the boy off his back.
It wasn't happening.
Null struggled by rote to get up off the dust-caked, lead-painted concrete floor, but he had to wait for his lungs to coordinate with his throat, and for the crease in his trachea to snap back a bit. It made no sense. There was very little reason for him not to be dead, but he wasn't. And what saved him was the boy on the back of the thug, riding that goon like a seasoned circus performer.
How did the boy do it?
Null had to wait there on the floor for his vision to focus to enough clarity to find out.
And what about the dweeb, the nerd in the glasses who had cowered in the shadows before slipping out?
Why was he at the center of this?
Null hefted himself up to a seated position, watching the dance of the goon and his furious jockey as, darkened with blood, he spun down to the ground in a weak effort to dislodge his attacker. Jockey boy was railing, it suddenly came to Null, screaming “Eat that shit, motherfucker!” over and over again at the same shrill pitch as laughter. It had looked like the jockey was prodding the goon on either side with something like spurs to keep him going.
He couldn't have been more wrong.
On either side of the goon going in—plain in returning light—Null saw that they were buck knives sunk into the goon repeatedly to stop him in his tracks.
No sooner did he grasp this than the goon let go and went down hard like a horse shot out from under its rider. But in this case, the rider rode him down screaming in triumph.
By the time Null could stand up straight, the boy was at his feet on his knees.
Null had already filled his hands with both guns well in advance of any move.
“Don't kill me, Lord!” said the boy, looking up with cracked and damaged eyes and a sallow complected face. “Please don't kill me.”
“Tell me what's most efficient, and I won't.”
“Let me serve you, Lord.”
“I don't need a blowjob.”
“God has humor.”
“Get up off your knees and back away three paces, please.”
Before the boy could obey, the goon moaned and tried to heft himself up, but Null put two nine-millimeter rounds in his head, which made a mess where he now quietly lay. Then the boy stepped back, quaveringly.
“Neat,” said the boy.
“Not especially, but I don't do the cleanup, so it's not my problem.”
“Lord, I want to help you in what you're doing, because I know you came to help me.”
“Wrong. I'm not here to help you. I'm deciding about killing you.”
“You have the power of life and death. So do it.”
“No. I only have the power of death.”
The boy looked at Null's topcoat, spreading aggressively with dark blood.
“You're hurt.”
“He missed the arteries and heart. I'll be okay.” He flicked a dollop of blood from the site of the wound against the wall so it made an audible splat.
“God cannot be killed.”
“I should kill you.”
“Then do it.” He squinted those cracked eyes shut.
“No, it would be out of balance and inefficient. Don't I owe you for freeing me from the neckbreaker?”
“God owes no one nothing.”
“I am not God.”
“He sent you then.”
“Possibly.”
“Just tell me what you want, what to do, and I'll do it, Lord.”
“Get the hell out, don't call me Lord, and don't follow me.”
“But I have to follow you.”
“We can assume a few more employees of Armenian specialties will be headed down here. I don't think another skirmish would have much of a point.”
“Lord, the point is wiping them all out because of what they are, what they do—they offend you and they have destroyed me. Malek, his crew—all of them—they killed my life and soul and left me to walk around knowing it with this hole in me sucking on my insides till I die, which won't be long.”
“Dramatic and familiar. I can't be moved to tears.”
“They killed my love.”
“Love is overrated. And once I overrated it too. Not anymore.”
“You're too far above it to be able to see.”
“Other direction,” said Null, beginning to wheeze. He opened a Ziplock baggie with tannish powder like brown sugar, put some in his palm and sucked it down in one long snort. “Now I'm going. Stay here with the corpses if you like, wait to take out a few more droids if you can, or go save yourself. It's all irrelevant. You're irrelevant too. What's relevant is that I need medical attention.” Then Null saw it -- the sweat and trembling, the wan nacreous skin, the wasted look and the cracked jaundiced eyes. “You need medical attention too, by the way.”
“No, I had medical attention. Not much they can do. Nothing they can do.”
Null spun about and headed up the dust-clotted steps. “Nothing I can do either.”
The boy followed himself out into the raw Boston day, wind whipping in its usual cruelty off the harbor and kicking up gangs of silicate and debris off the street, scourging the skin, tormenting the eyes. They both tasted dust coming up into the air and to both of them it meant more of the same. He turned and grabbed the boy's shoulders. He wheezed, giving up on the idea of sounding fierce.
“I'll hold court in the street and blow you away right now if I have to.”
“No need,” he said. “You say it's irrelevant to you whether I stay or go, live or die. So if it's irrelevant, if I'm irrelevant, then why does it matter if I follow you or not?”
“It doesn't.”
“So killing me would be inefficient. A waste of effort. And I could come in handy, just like I did in the basement.”
“Where you saved my ass.”
“You let me see it that way, and for a reason. You need to see that I'm with you. So, here I am, following you as ordained.”
“It would appear so.”
“Then I'll be with you until it's done, until I'm dead.”
“Which won't be too long, if Malek has his way.”
“Probably, but it won't be too long for him and his friends either, as long I'm with you.”
“Come along then. It's late and my blood-loss is getting out of hand. I need to go while I have enough buzz in me to work like energy.”
The boy unfolded a clean, blue bandana from the inside pocket of his soiled down parka and stuffed it into the wound on Null's upper chest and lower shoulder to stanch the blood.
“Pain doesn't bother you.”
“I'm past it,” he said, meandering into the immaculately modernized and strip mall re-hab’ed South Station and let the escalator carry him down to the Red Line.
“One day I'll be past it too.”
“Yes,” said Null. “We'll have something in common then.”
“Life everlasting?”
“No, we'll both be dead as the blues.”